Principal Software Engineer, Auto

About Upstart

Upstart is a leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than two-thirds of Upstart loans are approved instantly and are fully automated.

Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

The Auto team is responsible for lending and accurately creating loan offers for all of Auto loan products. The services owned by the Auto team are responsible for validating applicant data, interfacing with Machine Learning models to calculate borrower risk, matching applicants to lenders, and calculating interest rates, fees, etc. We combine ML, econometrics, and software engineering to optimally match capital supply to borrower demand. We are developing new capabilities for Upstart’s loan products and building a next generation software platform to accelerate innovation on behalf of our customers.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you are at the helm of driving technical excellence and innovation within the Auto team. You are responsible for setting the technical vision and direction that works backwards from our product strategy. You will lead our efforts to deliver software that uses machine learning to optimize how we price different components and continuously maximizes the efficiency of our borrower-lender marketplace. You will have the opportunity to design and build large scale systems from the ground up, partner closely with ML scientists, and work in a highly-collaborative and fast-paced environment. We are looking for a seasoned leader with a passion for technology, finance, experimentation, and distributed systems. If this sounds exciting, we would love to hear from you. 

How you’ll make an impact

• Define the long-term technical direction and roadmap for Auto in alignment with Upstart’s business objectives. 
• Lead the design and development of a system that continuously optimizes the matching of supply and demand for Upstart’s borrower-lender marketplace. 
• Work closely with ML scientists to improve and develop new models that improve core business metrics. 
• Guide the architectural evolution of Auto engineering systems with an emphasis on scaling innovation across multiple engineering teams. 
• Uncover and drive alignment across complex technical requirements, designs, trade-offs, influencing product direction 
• Proactively evaluate, prototype, and roll out new technologies/frameworks to help cultivate a culture of innovation
• Lead from the front, while mentoring and developing technical leaders

Minimum Qualifications 

• 10+ years of experience developing large scale distributed systems in the cloud
• 7+ years of experience leading large cross-team initiatives
• Experience building highly scalable APIs using containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes
• Solid grasp of software development principles and best practices for creating scalable and maintainable systems
• Proficiency in one or more object oriented programming languages like Java, C#, C++
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex business and technical concepts to all audiences
• Track record of successfully mentoring and developing technical leaders
• Experience working in dynamic fast paced organizations
• Ability to balance the needs of the business with the needs of engineering improvements
• Passion for clean code and architecture and initiative to “level-up” the engineering team with better practices & design
• You are able lead and resolve company-wide technical discussions and are able to collaborate and include input from cross-functional teams (security, devops, data, compliance and product)
• You have a good sense for build-vs-buy and are able to prioritize the highest ROI architectural investments

Preferred Qualifications

• High proficiency with Python
• Experience with A/B testing, GRPC, and Kafka
• Experience working in Fintech, Ads, or ML.
• Background in statistics, mathematics, or econometrics is a big plus. 
• Experience designing and building microservice-based archite